July 2010

Dear Friends,

Last summer my wife and I had a great holiday in the Lake District with some friends. That positive experience has made the recent tragedy of Derrick Bird’s shootings seem sharper.

By the time this is printed people will be beginning to pick up the pieces of their lives again. Perhaps that will provide some space for reflection. I was struck by an article in the Independent by Keith Ashcroft, an investigative psychologist. On 3rd June he wrote, “An incident like this should make us question our values. We need to think again about our exposure to violence…

“It raises wider issues too. We define ourselves through jobs, power and money. People are so driven they have no other sense of who they are. They can’t go to the doctor or priest, so they take a gun and kill people.”

Mercifully such events are extremely rare but violent images aren’t nor, I suspect, is our tendency to define ourselves by occupation, status or wealth.

Here’s a test; if you meet someone new this summer, how long can you maintain a conversation without telling them your occupation or asking them theirs? I’m quite practised at it on holidays because I find that as soon as someone discovers that I’m a clergyman they frequently want to tell me what’s wrong with the church (as if their list was longer than mine!) or they get very anxious about their language as if swearing is the worst imaginable sin.

I hope you can grab a break soon and learn to see yourself as God sees you, as a work of art quite irrespective of occupation, status or wealth.

Douglas Wren